which Ona after long consideration allowed me to add some ornaments of plain gold with which Mr. Sylvester has kindly presented me. But I think more of the people I am going to meet than of anything else, though I enjoy the home-feeling which a pretty dress gives me, as well as a violet does its bright blue coat.”
“I have heard a great preacher! What shall I say? At first it seems as if nothing could express my joy and satisfaction. The sapling that is shaken to its root by the winds of heaven, keeps silence I imagine. But O Aunty, if my smallness makes me quake, it also makes me feel. What gates of thought have been opened to me! What shining tracks of inquiry pointed out! I feel as if I had been shown a path where angels walked. Can it be that such words have been uttered every week of my life and I in ignorance of them? It is like the revelation of the ocean to unaccustomed eyes. Henceforth small things must seem like pebble stones above which stretch innumerable heavenly vistas. It is not so much that new things have been revealed to me as that old things have been made strangely eloquent. The voice of a daisy on the hill side, the breath of thunder in the mountain gorges, the blossoming of a child’s smile under its mother’s eye, the fact that golden portals are opened in every life for the coming and going of the messengers of God, all have been made real to me, real as the voice of the Saviour to his disciples as they walked in the fields or started back awestricken from the stupendous vision of the cross. It is a solemn thing to see one’s humble thoughts caught by the imagination of a great mind and carried on and up into regions you never realized existed.
“I was so burdened with joy that I could not forbear asking Mr. Sylvester if he did not feel as if the whole face of the world had changed since we entered those holy doors. He did not respond with the glad ‘Yes’ for which I hoped, and though his smile was very kind, I could not help wondering what it was that sometimes fell between us like a veil.”